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Salon: Issue 346
13 July 2015
Next issue: 27 July 2015
The Society of Antiquaries of London Online Newsletter (Salon) is a fortnightly digest of news from the heritage sector. It focuses on the activities of the Society and the contribution that the Society's Fellows make to public life. Like the intellectual salons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it aims to amuse and to stimulate debate as well as to inform. A copy of Salon’s editorial policy can be found on the Society’s website.
Please note: News, comment and feedback for publication in Salon are welcomed. Please send to the editor, Mike Pitts, at Salon Editor.
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Inside this issue
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From the Desk of the General Secretary
Magna Carta Through the Ages – Exhibition Update
The Society is delighted to announce that our landmark exhibition, Magna Carta Through the Ages, has attracted more than 8,000 visitors in its first seven weeks! The exhibition has played a key role in helping us increase public access to our collections and engage with new audiences.
The six-week lecture series, chaired by Fellow Stephen Church, has come to a close; each lecture was well-attended and enjoyed by guests. You can see recordings from at least five of the lectures at www.sal.org.uk/public-lectures. Some of these recordings have been used by other organisations also celebrating the 800th Anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta.
 Our Educational Workshops are coming to a close. All have been wildly successful. All programmes have been enthusiastically received by students and educators who have had the opportunity to explore the exhibition and work through a variety of workshops, including one workshop on medieval seals led by Fellow Elizabeth New (see photo, at a Workshop for Hackbridge Primary).
Exhibition visitors have provided overwhelmingly positive feedback, and have praised the Magna Carta exhibition, the historic building, the paintings collection and the amazing volunteers (of whom we have more than 40, including a few Fellows; without them this exhibition would not be possible). Most survey respondents have said that the exhibition has added to their understanding of the history of Magna Carta, nearly all respondents have expressed interest in attending future exhibitions, and several hundred visitors have asked to be kept informed about the Society’s future public programmes.
If you have not yet visited the exhibition, please come by! It is open Monday to Friday (until 4.00 pm on all weekdays) until 31 July. Need another reason to come by? Fellows receive a 20 per cent discount in the Magna Carta shop when they visit the exhibition!
And don’t forget to spread the word to your family and friends: send them to www.sal.org.uk/magna-carta for visitor information.
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Forthcoming Events for Fellows
6 August: Fellows' Private View of Magna Carta and the Changing Face of Revolt
Time is running out to book your place for this event! The Society has lent one of its most well-known objects, the Bosworth Cross, to the Palace Green Library for the exhibition Magna Carta and the Changing Face of Revolt, at the Palace Green Library, University of Durham. To celebrate this important loan, the Society has organised a Fellows' private view of the exhibition. This is a wonderful opportunity for Fellows living far from London to attend a Society event, connect with Society officers and staff members, and enjoy seeing one of the Society’s most recognisable objects on display to a new audience. We hope you will be able to join us! Tickets are £12 each and can be booked online or by contacting our Executive Assistant (admin@sal.org.uk; 020 7479 7080). Information and booking details are online at www.sal.org.uk/events.
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Jewry Wall Museum Saved
 Leicester City Council is to buy the building that houses the Jewry Wall Museum, in an extraordinary move when local authorities across the country are struggling to maintain heritage and museum services.
The Council closed the museum to public access in 2011, along with two other city museums, hoping private organisations would take over what Sarah Levitt, Head of Leicester Arts and Museums, said were ‘not part of the Council’s core business’. Now the Council has announced that it will buy Vaughan College, a listed 1960s building on the market since 2013, from Leicester University for £300,000. The museum occupies the ground floor.
City Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby, re-elected with a strong majority in May, could be on his way to becoming a heritage hero. It was his initiative to buy a former school that now houses the Richard III Visitor Centre. A recent study estimated the benefit to the city and the university of the small excavation that found the king’s grave, through tourism, other business opportunities and advertising, has already exceeded £62 million.
Buying the former college, said Soulsby, ‘gives us an opportunity to refresh our Jewry Wall museum, which – with its Roman masonry, mosaics and wall plasters – reflects such an important part of Leicester’s history.’ Nothing has been worked out, he added, but the council expected to improve access, and create ‘a significant new gateway’ that connected the riverside regeneration area and the city centre.
The announcement came shortly after the Department for Culture, Media & Sport released figures that it says show ‘employment within the UK’s creative industries is increasing at more than twice the rate of the wider UK economy’. Yet within those industries, between 2013 and 2014 jobs at museums, galleries and libraries actually fell 4%.
Leicester's purchase is good news to Martin Henig FSA, who is Honorary President of the Friends of Jewry Wall Museum. He had been concerned about the building's fate, he told Salon, as it houses ‘what is in effect perhaps the best urban site museum in England, looking out on the substantial remains of the Roman baths, including Jewry Wall, the wall of the baths basilica itself.’ It was, he said, ‘one of the key sites which developed my enthusiasm for archaeology as a child. I am delighted that the museum will be given such a welcome lease of life with the prospect of considerable enhancement in the future.’
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Greek Heritage at Risk
As I write Greece is facing the ultimate turn that will leave it in or out of the Eurozone. Whichever way it goes, severe financial problems are affecting the country’s museums and historic sites and the practice of archaeology. They will continue to do so in ways that make the difficulties we face in the UK seem academic. According to the US non-profit organisation the Committee for Cultural Policy (CCP), 204 of 290 museums in Greece are state run; all are supervised by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, funded from central government.
In 2014, says the CCP, constitutional lawyer George Kasimatis petitioned UNESCO to enforce international treaties for the protection of cultural heritage and in effect force the Greek government to allocate more funding and stop privatisation. ‘Research and excavations are being abandoned,’ said Kasimatis. ‘Museums are closed or shut down ... Clandestine excavations, pillage and illicit trafficking of cultural property increased by 25% the past 3 years.’ On 9 July The Art Newspaper reported that ‘leading Greek art professionals’ say ‘major public cultural institutions in Greece are on the point of collapse’.
Salon would be interested to hear from Fellows with first-hand experience of current events in Greece impacting on heritage and archaeology.
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New Richard III portrait – once owned by Lord Byron?
 A rarely seen portrait of Richard III was shown at Masterpiece London, a fair for art, antiques and design (and antiquities) held this year at the Royal Hospital Chelsea in late June. The fair was attended, say the organisers, by ‘over 150 museum directors and curators from the world’s finest cultural institutions’; and, it would seem, quite a few very, very rich buyers.
The portrait (left) was exhibited by Philip Mould & Company, and sold at an asking price of £55,000. It is one of 20-odd paintings of the king known to survive from the 16th and 17th centuries, of which two of the earliest are in the Society’s collections. The excavation of Richard III’s remains has brought new interest to these works, not least for the facial reconstruction based on his skull, allowing an unusual opportunity to compare sitter with representations.
 The exhibited oil was last seen publicly at a sale at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, in 1921. In design and colours it is a near exact copy (or vice versa) of a portrait hanging at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire (right) and owned by the National Trust – with the curious exception of the left hands. Little is known about either painting. Philip Mould’s listing notes that the Newstead work is described by 19th century guides as ‘hanging alongside other monarchs’.
That might have been the end of the story. Mould’s catalogue helpfully adds background to the royal portraits and a page about the history of Richard III, but what caught my eye, and was plainly intended to, was the headlined provenance: ‘Once owned by the famous poet Lord Byron’.
 Mould himself tweeted this claim a couple of times ahead of the sale. Evidence is curiously absent from the sales listing, so I asked around.
Pamela Tudor-Craig FSA curated a landmark exhibition of Richard III and his times for the then Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Roy Strong FSA, in 1973; her catalogue remains a key source of information. She knew nothing of the Newstead portrait, though when I told her it was exhibited by Philip Mould, immediately said it must be genuine. She fondly remembers ‘an astonishing exhibition at Hampton Court’, put on by Mould, ‘of all the Queens of Henry VIII, each of them from a previously unknown source.’
That Byron owned a Richard III oil was news too to Anna Camilleri, Editor of the Newstead Review. Ralph Lloyd-Jones, Team Librarian, Archives & Local History at Nottinghamshire County Council, said there was no reference to Richard III in Byron's letters. However, ‘he did see Kean play him in the Shakespeare version (in 1814), though it wasn't his favourite play. If he mentions Richard in his works it will almost certainly be in a disparaging way because of his anti-monarchism. As he himself was wont to point out, he was not a great collector, which gave him the moral high ground against the likes of Lord Elgin.’
Christine Kenyon Jones, Research Fellow in the Department of English, King’s College London, could not comment, but noted that Byron was ‘certainly interested in Edmund Kean’s representation of Shakespeare’s Richard III, and referred to himself as “a sort of Richard III, deformed in mind and body†(he had a club foot).’ The catalogue for Byron’s 1816 book sale (evocatively titled A Collection Of Books, Late the Property of a Nobleman about to Leave England on a Tour) lists a ‘Portrait of Kean, in Richard III, engraved by Turner. Singer 9s 6d’.
So to Haidee Jackson, Curator at Newstead Abbey. She was able to confirm, from the dimensions, that this is the portrait sold by Knight Frank and Rutley in 1921. However, she knew of no evidence to indicate the painting had been in the house before Byron had left and the Abbey was bought (in semi-ruinous state) by Thomas Wildman in 1818; only then do guidebooks (as Mould correctly states) refer to a portrait of Richard III. A 1762 catalogue of portraits of the 5th Lord Byron, a 1772 sales catalogue and an 1815 inventory, all make no mention of a Richard III portrait. Nonetheless, said Jackson, ‘None of this is conclusive.’
Adding further interest is a dendrochronological analysis conducted by Peter Klein at the University of Hamburg, kindly shown to me by Rebecca Ingram at Philip Mould & Co. This reports the wood in the panel to be of Eastern European origin, from a tree felled between 1474 and 1480. This is much the oldest of any similarly dated Richard III portraits (as the Mould listing points out, 'the king met his violent end' at Bosworth in 1485), and, if correct, clearly suggests over-painting of an earlier portrait. ‘It is impossible to say for certain’, said Lawrence Hendra, Associate Director at Philip Mould.
‘Not every painting is quite as it seems,’ says the charismatic Philip Mould in a trailer with Fiona Bruce for a new series of BBC TV’s Fake or Fortune? He should know; and perhaps he knows something about the Newstead portrait that others don’t.
 • Catherine Daunt’s Portrait Sets in Tudor and Jacobean England is now available online, after being submitted as a D. Phil. thesis at the University of Sussex in May (where her supervisor was Maurice Howard FSA). This mammoth and fascinating work is but part of a Leverhulme Trust research project at the National Portrait Gallery, Making Art in Tudor Britain. Daunt refers frequently to the Society’s collection, which has recently been described in Catalogue of Paintings in the Collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London, by Jill Franklin FSA, Bernard Nurse FSA and Pamela Tudor-Craig FSA (Brepols 2015).
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A Source of Matrimony
‘Francis Pryor does well to respond to Tim Hunt's comments,’ writes Rick Jones FSA, on the subject of gender balance in archaeology. UCL saw Hunt resign from an honorary post after social media criticism of a poor joke about gender-segregated labs, since when its handling of the situation has come under criticism.
I preface this by saying that I am reporting on this topic, not judging, and nothing should be read as necessarily representing Society of Antiquaries’ policy. ‘Fellows are responsible for nominating candidates for Fellowship,’ adds General Secretary John Lewis, ‘and Fellows decide whether to elect them or not. The composition of the Fellowship is thus entirely in the hands of Fellows.’
Jones feels Hunt's attitudes to women belongs in 1915 – the year when J. P. Droop published Archaeological Excavation, an opinionated fieldwork manual. In Chapter VII, Droop confesses to have ‘seen something of a mixed dig’. He wishes he hadn’t.
‘It is an experiment I would be reluctant to try again … My objection lies in this, that the work of an excavation on the dig and off it lays on those who share in it a bond of closer daily intercourse than is conceivable, except perhaps in the Navy where privacy is said to be unobtainable, except for a captain; with the right men that is one of the charms of the life, but between men and women, except in chance cases, I do not believe that such close and unavoidable companionship can ever be other than a source of irritation; at any rate I believe that, however it may affect women, the ordinary male at least cannot stand it. It is true that it might also be a source of matrimony, but as that would mean a temporary end to the serious work of two members of the expedition, it can hardly be used as an argument for co-operation … mixed digging I think means a loss of easiness in the atmosphere and consequent loss of efficiency.’
Reviewing the book in Classical Weekly in 1917, J. G. Winter noted, without comment, that this chapter was ‘a protest against the cooperation between men and women in excavation’.
Only slightly more forgiving views existed 50 years ago. In Historical Archaeology (1969), Ivor Noël Hume FSA was unusually open in expressing an attitude that not a few older excavators may remember as commonplace well into the 70s. ‘Digging is … a masculine occupation’, he wrote:
‘… and while more women than men are likely to do well in the pot-washing shed or in the laboratory, shovel-wielding females are not everyday sights in Western society … one lady volunteer improperly dressed for the occasion can cause havoc throughout the crew as well as damaging the ground on which she walks. High heels and low décolletage are a lethal combination.’
Not everyone finds Hunt’s joke antiquated. ‘In my opinion,’ writes Alastair Maxwell-Irving FSA, ‘Sir Tim Hunt was crucified just for stating what any honest person in business knows to be largely a home truth.’ ‘Male and female antiquaries’, he adds, ‘should be nominated and elected solely on their record of expertise, research and publications, and nothing else.’ With which last comment at least, surely few Fellows would disagree.
‘Droop may be forgiven for his views,’ concludes Jones. ‘The figures for the gender changes in the Fellowship are an improvement, but there's still a long way to go.’
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Cold Hunting
 Stone artefacts in fresh condition were found beside the River Dee in 2003, the first evidence for Mesolithic activity in the heart of the Cairngorms. Fieldwalking by University College Dublin in 2013 recovered further artefacts, and in a joint project with Stirling University and National Trust Scotland (NTS), the University of Aberdeen dug test excavations. In situ charcoal and microliths were recovered (described as ‘a classic Scottish Narrow Blade assemblage’), and pits identified.
All this was interesting enough, but last year excavation continued on a larger scale. More features and artefacts were found, and associated radiocarbon dates obtained which included 8281–7990 BC from an occupation layer, and 7050–6687 BC for a firepit. The NTS announced the dates (available since March to the eagle-eyed on the Aberdeenshire Sites and Monuments Record website) on 7 July. This is not the oldest evidence for hunter-gatherers in Scotland, a credit which currently goes to Howburn Farm in South Lanarkshire, where Upper Palaeolithic activity dates from 14,000 years ago. But the new dates put people in mountainous regions through a time of permanent snow fields and possible glacier formation. As Shannon Fraser, NTS archaeologist put it, ‘Glen Geldie is a very chilly place today, even with all our modern outdoor clothing.’
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Dan Cruickshank Under Attack
Islamic State’s deliberate destruction of archaeological remains is well known, but if you don’t care to watch online videos, its manipulation and media professionalism may have passed you by. Dan Cruickshank's Civilisation Under Attack, broadcast on 4 June by BBC 4, revealed all. Cruickshank was suitably heart-stricken as he watched, with us, what felt like every relevant film Islamic State (IS) had made.
It is appalling to see. It is also confusing. We are confronted with the apparent conflict between concern for heritage and for human lives (videos of antiquity destruction, said writer and historian Tom Holland, are more upsetting than videos of human suffering because they express a greater truth about what is being destroyed). We are aware that watching (and broadcasting) the videos is complicit with IS intentions. In an extraordinary interview, Anjem Choudary, a British IS supporter who had fled to a cake shop from a London plagued by naked cyclists, told Cruickshank how pleased he was to see videos of cultural destruction.
One of the most shocking moments for an archaeologist, was the accusation that archaeologists should take responsibility for the losses. It is they, said Choudary, who dug up the ‘profane lifestyle’ and put them on display. The natural thing to do was destroy them, ‘and this time nobody can dig them up’. In March IS’s glossy English-language propaganda magazine, Dabiq, reported the same line. ‘The kuffar [a rude word for non-Muslims] had unearthed these statues and ruins in recent generations and attempted to portray them as part of a cultural heritage and identity … Yet this opposes the guidance of Allah and His Messenger.’ We are, it seems, involved whether we like it or not. Those with access to BBC iPlayer can watch the programme until 4 August.
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From Syria to London?
A better-funded film would have investigated the colossal lion in the room – the trade in broken and pillaged antiquities, that, it has been said, the videos are designed to promote. IS may be flooding the market with billions of dollars worth of artefacts, securing an income second only to that from oil. What it’s really worth, said The Financial Times in a piece headed ‘How antiquities are funding terrorism’, is difficult to say; the value of clandestine objects is much diminished. UNESCO Director-General Irina Bukova, who calls the destruction ‘cultural cleansing’, said the organisation is fighting the trade. As, in a way, is IS – by brutally banning the market to maximise its own profits.
Yet in the midst of war hard evidence is difficult to find. There is no sign ‘of important Syrian or Iraqi antiquities reaching the Western market from ISIS’, said the Committee for Cultural Policy (whose President collects Asian art); ‘activists are cynically bent on using the Syrian tragedy to spread disinformation on the art trade’.
Mark Altaweel, Lecturer in the Archaeology of the Near East at UCL Institute of Archaeology, was taken window shopping for a Guardian feature. ‘A few hours into a hunt around London,’ reported Rachel Shabi, he had ‘uncovered objects that, he says, are “very likely to be coming from conflict regions†in Iraq and Syria’. David Gill FSA, Professor of Archaeological Heritage at University Campus Suffolk, told Shabi that looted goods are ‘coming out through Turkey and Beirut and then containered to who knows where,’ reaching London with ‘paperwork, internally, within Europe’.
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Celts: Art and Identity
 On 9 July the British Museum (BM) flooded its Twitter feed with photos of Celtic art and culture, the subjects of a major exhibition developed in partnership between the BM and National Museums Scotland (NMS). It opens in London on September 24 and in Edinburgh 10 March 2016. Neil MacGregor FSA (BM Director) and Gordon Rintoul (NMS Director) addressed members of the press who had made it across London during a tube strike, to introduce the show. It ‘will tell the story of the different peoples who have used or been given the name “Celts†through the stunning art objects that they made, including intricately decorated jewellery, highly stylised objects of religious devotion, and the decorative arts of the late 19th century which were inspired by the past.’ The lavish catalogue (Salon has seen early proofs) is edited by Fraser Hunter FSA and Julia Farley (the Edinburgh and London curators respectively), and includes contributions from Jody Joy FSA among several leading specialists. Fellow Maev Kennedy wrote about the show in The Guardian. Some wonderful things to look forward to.
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Long-Term Change in Human Societies
 In 1998 the late Andrew Sherratt FSA was invited to give the Context and Human Society Lectures at Boston University, with the overall title Between Evolution and History: Long-Term Change in Human Societies. The lecture titles were: (1) Enlightenment thought and the Romantic Revolt, (2) Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds: Progress and fashion in the social sciences, and (3) Bringing culture back in: How societies change.
Afterwards, Sherratt prepared a booklet containing the lecture texts and line illustrations. Only a few were printed, and the work has been difficult to obtain. Norman Hammond FSA writes to say that Susan Sherratt has now located Andrew’s own copy, annotated by him in pencil. She has scanned it and placed it online on her academia.edu page, from where it can be downloaded and printed. |
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Enormously Strong Steel
 Jenny Freeman writes on behalf of SAVE Britain’s Heritage about, to quote the title of her report, The Curious Case of the Phoenix Columns in Smithfield General Market. Along with its neighbour, the Annexe, and the famous Meat Market, all in the Smithfield Conservation Area, Smithfield General Market was built by Sir Horace Jones (1805–87), a Victorian architect. It survived extensive demolition proposals after a public inquiry in 2014
Freeman details the origins of the ‘enormously strong’ steel ‘Phoenix Columns’ in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and how Sir Horace Jones, uniquely in the UK, came to use the same technique in the General Market. ‘In the history of 19th century civil engineering’, she writes, ‘the wrought-iron Phoenix column played an intermediary role in the transition from the use of cast-iron to the employment of steel.’ Jones later turned to steel for the structure of London’s Tower Bridge.
SAVE believes this new research by Freeman, who wrote her PhD on Jones, seals the case for listing the entire Smithfield complex. At present the Meat Market is listed Grade II* and the Poultry Market Grade II, while the Western Market Buildings are unlisted. SAVE also considers that there is a strong case to make the entire area, including St Bart’s Hospital and St Bartholomew the Great church, a World Heritage Site.
Freemans’ report can be downloaded from SAVE’s website.
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Old Oswestry is Test Case
‘A powerful group of senior archaeologists are sharpening their trowels’, wrote Robin Stummer in The Observer on 27 June, to save Old Oswestry Hill Fort, Shropshire, from a housing estate which the County Council wish to see built immediately beside the fort.
Mike Heyworth FSA, Director of the Council for British Archaeology and Sir Barry Cunliffe FSA, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford, are quoted in the article. ‘Old Oswestry is in the premier league of monuments; among hill forts, it’s in the top 10 with Maiden Castle and Danebury,’ said Heyworth. ‘We need a groundswell of feeling’, said Cunliffe, ‘that it’s a case of “this far but no further†as far as some of these major sites are concerned. I think that this has grossly overstepped what is ethically acceptable.’ The site of the proposed housing is not protected, but archaeologists argue its proximity to a major scheduled monument is a material consideration. ‘People are looking at Oswestry as a test case [of the new National Planning Policy Framework]’, said Heyworth. ‘It is worth making a fuss about this particular issue’, said Cunliffe, ‘because it does look like the thin end of the wedge.’
On 9 July the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced new ideas to encourage more building, blaming planning laws for a serious housing shortage. The wedge's other end looks increasingly thick. |
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Moving houses
Michele Hill-Perkins in London and Jonathan Gill in Auckland, New Zealand, have written to the Society about interesting cases of historic buildings threatened by development. Most dramatically, Gill’s old Auckland school, called King's School (being the preparatory school to King's College, Auckland) has decided to demolish its centrepiece Hanna Block and clock tower, built in 1936, while retaining an adjacent 1970s block. Demolition is planned for Christmas.
 ‘What we have remaining [of historic buildings] in the traditional British form (following the large loss of heritage to the Christchurch earthquakes)’, says Gill, ‘is extremely important to us. All the development at King's School throughout its history has been specifically in keeping with the design of the Hanna Block, and thus the removal of this building will irreparably affect the school forever as its iconic heart will have been removed.’
A petition has been set up to save the Hanna Block, and there is a Facebook page. The proposed new building (costing ‘in excess of $30 million’) can be seen here.
 A proposal affecting Redan Street, London W14, is altogether more subtle, but it affects quietly delicate architecture of a kind that can easily be overlooked in a city now urgently seeking to expand existing accommodation. The street lies within a Conservation Area, and features low terraces which Hill-Perkins describes as constituting a ‘quite superb survivor of a late 19th century streetscape, and one of the few in West London composed almost entirely of frontage cottages with an industrial artisanship base’.
All was well until 2014, when ‘a proposal to install two Velux roof lights into the front roofscape of one of these properties’ was approved. That was followed by another owner seeking to insert two such windows into a raised roof. The planning authority apparently has no objection in principle to raising the ridge height, and has accepted three proposals to variously lift roof lines. ‘The long term consequences of the Local Planning Authority’s approach on the historic streetscape’, says Hill-Perkins, ‘are self evident’.
Allowing extra storeys to be added to London homes without consent is one of Osborne’s new planning proposals (see Old Oswestry, above). The Green Belts (which The Economist has long argued unhelpfully distort the planning environment) would remain protected, but major infrastructure projects including ‘elements of housing’ would be speeded up. Automatic permissions would be granted for ‘suitable’ brownfield sites across the UK. Perhaps we'll all become rescue archaeologists again.
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Heritage Lottery Grants
On 29 June the Heritage Lottery Fund announced grants adding up to £34 million for 16 historic parks and cemeteries, to ‘fix pavilions, bandstands and boathouses and spruce up these tired but important green spaces’. Among the winners, Belfast City Cemetery has ‘earmarked funding’ for £1,852,800, for a project that will ‘reconnect people to the heritage of the cemetery and its monuments, memorials and the prominent figures laid to rest within its walls’.
On 1 July it was announced that an additional £4million has been made available through the First World War: Then and Now programme, which offers grants from £3,000 to £10,000 to help communities explore, conserve and share local heritage of the First World War.
Separately, Historic England has published a guide to listing war memorials, aimed at encouraging people to submit new applications. |
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2015 John Betjeman Award
 Sensitive conservation work to two 20th-century wall paintings in the Church of St Martin of Tours at Bilborough, Nottinghamshire, won it this year’s John Betjeman Award from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). The murals were completed in 1946 by war artist Evelyn Gibbs (1905–91), lost during the construction of an extension in the 1970s, and found in 2009 by workmen re-wiring the church. The paintings feature the Annunciation, with Mary and Gabriel kneeling in the village of Bilborough.
SPAB also announced a commendation for repairs to the medieval choir stalls at St Mary, Nantwich.
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News of Fellows
Richard Knowles FSA tells Salon that the late C. M. P. (Kate) Taylor FSA received an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours on 12 June, for services to heritage and to the community in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
Ralph Hyde FSA, who was Keeper of Prints and Maps at the Guildhall Library, London, for over 25 years, died on 5 June, aged 76. An obituary in The Telegraph says he is ‘perhaps best remembered for finding the Rhinebeck Panorama – a 9 ft-long series of four linked watercolour panels depicting London at the beginning of the 19th century’. The panels are thought to have been sketched from a hot-air balloon.
Philip Betancourt FSA writes to say that in a special ceremony on 3 June at the Embassy of Greece in Washington, D.C., the Hellenic Republic awarded Malcolm Hewitt Wiener FSA the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour for his contribution to the study of Aegean prehistory. Wiener spoke of the importance of studying those first complex societies of the Western world, and referred to the quantum leaps made possible by the use of innovative scientific applications. His extensive publications on the Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age include the rise and fall of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, their relationship to civilizations of the Near East and Egypt, and the chronology of the ancient world via comparisons of radiocarbon, tree-ring, ice-core and astronomical dates in relation to texts, inscriptions and artefact stratigraphy.
 The Stonehenge Landscape: Analysing the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, by Mark Bowden FSA, Sharon Soutar, David Field FSA and Martyn Barber (Historic England), presents the most significant findings of English Heritage’s landscape archaeologists within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, and shows how these integrate with research undertaken by others. It features new analysis and interpretation of Stonehenge and all visible monuments in the landscape, and is well illustrated.
 The Real Lives of Roman Britain, by Guy de la Bédoyère FSA (Yale University Press), focuses on personal stories, revealing Roman Britain as a place where the ambitious scramble for power and prestige, the devout seek solace and security through religion, and men and women eke out existences in a provincial frontier land – the first book to infuse the story of Britannia with a beating heart.
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Fellows' Bookplates
Thank you for all those bookplates. The subject might have been expected to interest Fellows, but the response has been so strong that if this feature continues, it will have to become very selective! But don't let that put you off: good design and good stories are a strong mix.
Writing from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Daniel Woolf FSA sent an 18th century bookplate that resides in Woolf’s copy of William Dugdale's A Short View of the Late Troubles in England (1681).  The book originally belonged to William Constable FSA (1721–91), a naturalist and collector. Most of Constable's collections are now displayed in purpose-built cabinets at Burton Constable Hall, East Yorkshire; Hull City Museums was given 201 objects from his Cabinet of Curiosities.
Another title in Woolf’s rare book collection, John Horsley’s Britannia Romana (1732), was once owned by Aileen Fox FSA. ‘Previously Fox-owned,’ says Woolf, ‘now Woolf-owned’ (below).
A copy of Mariette-Bey's Monuments of Upper Egypt (1877) also crossed the Atlantic, and is now in the library of Curtis Runnels FSA, Professor of Archaeology at Boston University. The original owner was General Pitt-Rivers FSA, who affixed this bookplate (left). It is, says ). It is, says Runnels, ‘the first one I have seen in 30 years of collecting. Gibbon is by far more common!’
John Titford FSA thanked Salon for referring to his future book on plates used by former members of St John's College. ‘This paid dividends,’ he says. ‘Almost at once a Fellow, a graduate of St John's College, Cambridge, emailed me and offered to let me have a copy of his own bookplate. I was delighted – recent Johnian bookpla tes are much harder to come by than much older ones!’
Titford sent this (right), one of Ralph Griffin FSA’s plates. Griffin was the Society’s Secretary 1921–27, and Honorary Keeper of monumental brass rubbings at the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge. He entered St John's in 1873.
 Paul Latcham FSA, who describes himself as a student and collector of bookplates for many years and sometime editor of the Bookplate Journal, has his own typographical label printed in letterpress with a decorative border by Rampant Lions Press of Cambridge. He has offered a Chippendale-style design made for Robert Masters FSA (1713-1798), historian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (left).
 This striking bookplate (right) of J. W. Walker FSA (1859-1953), historian and author of Wakefield, its History and People (1934), was submitted by Richard Knowles FSA, who found it in a copy of Historic Sketch of the Parish Church, Wakefield, by J. L. Sisson (1824).
Norman Hammond FSA sent two bookplates. One is that of G. H. S. Bushnell FSA (1903–78), who was Curator of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 1948–70, and the Society’s Vice-President 1961–65. It is in a copy of Oliver La Farge’s Mexican ethnography Santa Eulalia (1947). The plate, says Hammond (below, with the book), is dated 7 September 1936, when Bushnell and Patricia Ruck married and impaled their families’ arms; it was drawn by ‘HL’, whose ligatured initials are at lower left.
 The second, in Norman Hammond’s words, ‘developed a narrative of its own!’ So much so that there is no room for it here. Watch out for the complete and curious story of John Henry Evans FSA’s bookplate in the next edition of Salon.
If you can get to Burlington House, you can see huge numbers of real bookplates. Heather Rowland, the Society’s Head of Library and Collections, says the Library has several fine collections. ‘The Hall Crouch Collection of about 45,000 bookplates from the 17th to 20th centuries was given to the Society by Charles Hall Crouch in 1964. Most of the plates are armorials. The collection was sorted and listed by Brian Schofield FSA. As well as a listing by name of owner Brian also compiled an alphabetical list of designers/engravers. The Library also has a few other smaller collections of bookplates, including the Garraway Rice Collection of mostly 19th century British armorial plates, and the Viner Collection of Oxford and Cambridge bookplates from the 17th to 20th centuries, arranged by colleges.’ For more information, email Heather Rowland.
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Memorials to Fellows
 Stiffleaf, an artist living in London, tweeted this poignant memorial plaque to Fellow Charles Alfred Stothard (1786–1821). Stothard became the Society’s official historical draughtsman in 1815, and made a key record of the Bayeux Tapestry which the Society published the year after his death. Pursuing his passion for illustrating monumental effigies, in 1821 he toured Devon for Daniel Lysons' county history. He was tracing a portrait from a window in the church at Bere Ferrers, Devon, when he fell from his ladder and died.
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Forthcoming Heritage Events
14–15 July: SEAHA Conference 2015 (UCL, London)
The first international Conference on Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA) aims to provide a platform for scientists, researchers, engineers, professionals, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers, to engage and discuss emerging trends in the field of heritage science research, innovation and best practice in the interpretation, conservation and management of cultural heritage. There are 74 speakers, and Steve Trow FSA is to make one of three keynote presentations.
Until 14 September: Working the Stasis (Hadrian’s Wall)
Artist Dawn Felicia Knox, in partnership with English Heritage (EH), has been exploring the conservation of Hadrian’s Wall, and its surroundings and artefacts. ‘Teams of people work endlessly to preserve them,’ says EH, ‘making it appear as if no further time passes.’ Knox watched the annual cleaning and cataloguing, saving the stuff discarded by conservators. Her archive is exhibited at Birdoswald Roman Fort. Photos, videos and recordings can be experienced at Chesters Roman Fort, and Knox has blogged about the project.
24 September: Rome's Hidden Frontier (London)
 The British Institute at Ankara is presenting a lecture by Timothy Mitford entitled ‘East of Asia Minor. Rome’s Hidden frontier’, at 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH, at 6.30pm. Isolated by wars, instability, sensitivities about Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, language, and wild, remote mountains accessible only on horseback or on foot, Rome’s remotest frontier ran across eastern Turkey to the Black Sea. Fellow of BIAA in the early 1960s, Tim Mitford embarked on 50 years of fieldwork, continued throughout and after a career in the Royal Navy. This illustrated lecture presents the monumental evidence: fortresses and forts linked by strategic roads, bridges, glimpses of watch and signalling systems, with inscriptions, sighted coins, and navigation of the Euphrates itself. Free to BIAA and Roman Society members.
From 29 September: Westminster History Club (London)
The fifth season of the Westminster History Club, set up to raise funds for scholarly research into the history of Westminster by the Victoria County History (VCH), starts in September. The Club meets in the Lord Mayor’s Reception Rooms. This is a social event, held four times a year, with a glass of wine and a talk on some aspect of the history of Westminster by a guest speaker. The first Speaker will be Julia Merritt, on ‘Westminster and the English Revolution 1640-1660’. The full programme is available on the VCH website.
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Vacancies
BIAA Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship
Applications are invited for a Post-doctoral Research Fellow position to work at the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) within the framework of a research project on Turkey and Britain 1914-1952: From enemies to allies. Candidates should have completed a doctorate and must have a current connection with a UK University. The candidate should have a degree in history, international relations, political science or Turkish studies. The fellowship should lead to a substantial publication either in monograph or in article form.
The Fellowship will be tenable for one year from 15 October 2015. The Fellow will be based at the Institute in Ankara. The BIAA houses a lively postgraduate and postdoctoral research community, covering Turkish history and culture from Neolithic times to contemporary politics. There are good research facilities and an excellent library, and researchers have access to national archival and university resources in Turkey’s capital city.
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Propose a Lecture or Seminar
Please email Renée LaDue, the Society's Communications Officer if you are interested in giving a lecture at one of the Society's Ordinary Meetings (Thursday evenings at 17.00) or as part of our Public Lecture series (occasional Tuesday afternoons at 13.00). When proposing a lecture, it is helpful to provide a working title, a few sentences about the topic and its significance, and how you will make it relevant and accessible to the entirety of the diverse Fellowship. We welcome papers based on new research on themes related to the Society's field of interest: the study of the material past. You can view our current lecture programme in the Events section of our website.
Fellows are also encouraged to propose topics or themes for conferences or seminars that bring scholars and professionals from a variety of disciplines together to explain, discuss and debate our material culture. Please email Renée LaDue, the Society's Communications Officer, if you are interested in helping us organise such an event.
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